​It seems like most of the fringe history purveyors have been laying low this month, the traditional time for a summer vacation. Or maybe the current flap over white supremacy has left purveyors of bad ideas about the past trying to stay below radar since so many of their ideas tend to have white supremacist undertones. Whatever the reason, it seems like there have been fewer high-profile fringe history claims this week than in most. So today I bring you an interesting meditation on H. P. Lovecraft instead. The piece in question comes from conservative Christian C. R. Wiley, who argues that Lovecraft’s weird fiction can actually help to bring Christians closer to God by giving them a “taste” of the “weirdness” of God. It’s an unusual argument, and perhaps one that Lovecraft would find amusing, if not offensive.

​Wiley’s argument centers on the fact that many modern Christians don’t actually engage with the Bible in all its many facets but instead have created a sort of fantasy version of Christianity based on a simpler understanding of God as all-loving, a sort of cosmic grandfather. Wiley prefers to deal with God as depicted in the Old Testament, a being so far beyond the human that comprehension is impossible. It is this vision of God that Wiley says Lovecraft can help us understand by describing efforts to grapple with a transcendent reality that we can glimpse only dimly and incompletely.

But that can be seen in the Bible in those seldom preached upon passages in Ezekiel, or Job, or even the Psalms. In those places we see all sorts of weird, uncanny things. And the weirdest being of all is God. He is Wholly Other and utterly weird. This is the God of the whirlwind, who dwells in thick darkness, who is so radioactive you drop dead just by getting too close. He is so overwhelming he is as crushing as Niagara Falls, only more so–infinitely more.

​Basically, the Old Testament God is Yog-Sothoth with a touch of Nyarlathotep’s impish caprice.

Wiley adds that he sees Lovecraft as essentially reproducing the mysterium tremendum of Christianity, but stripping it of hope. When Lovecraftian protagonists encounter the Old Ones, they are transformed and often destroyed because these creatures are essentially gods, but gods who lack compassion and care. Therefore, if Christians can experience a bit of the awe and power of being in the presence of a god through Lovecraft, they would be better prepared to experience the still more tremendous power of the Christian God, who is not indifferent but actually cares.

Wiley seems to feel that it is coincidental, or at least fortuitous, that Lovecraft’s prose evokes the terror of the divine, but this is entirely according to plan. Lovecraft was, as Wiley knows, an atheist, but he grew up in a time and place suffused with religion and in a family that was not entirely indifferent to faith. When Lovecraft created the Cthulhu Mythos, he purposely drew on the conventions of faith to lend a sense of ritual and power to the fake gods he intended to parody and counter Christianity. Thus, the passages from the Necronomicon that he quotes, along with Old Castro’s description of the Old Ones, purposely echo passages in the King James Bible. “The Dunwich Horror” uses Christian themes and imagery, and the final line of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” echoes the doxology at the end of the Protestant version (and occasionally the Catholic version) of the Lord’s Prayer. It is no coincidence that the transcendent power of the Old Ones that Wiley feels echoes the power of God.

This has to be the strangest endorsement of Lovecraft I've heard to date. "Read Lovecraft to understand how unknowable God is to the mortal mind!" Um, yeah, that's kind of the point behind gods.

The beliefs of other cultures would suffice to make Wiley's argument. Sacrifice another human to appease the gods? Why? They're gods, it's not our place to ask why! If a mortal man sleeps with another's wife, that's wrong. If Zeus does it, well, you know, our rules don't apply to the gods.

I could easily see Lovecraft being equal parts offended and amused by Wiley's idea simultaneously.

You're certainly not wrong about that, and in my own analysis of Lovecraft I have spoken about how his stories approach the sublime. There is clearly a connection to the religious impulse, and all you have really suggested is an inverse of what most secular readers get from the stories. They see them as evidence that religion is unnecessary to experience the sublime, and you would use it as an introduction to the religious sublime.

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TONY S.

8/19/2017 05:16:52 pm

"A certain mental flexibility is required to do this, naturally."

Completely unnecessary when you are familiar with Lovecraft, including but not limited to: his outlook on everything that fascinated him, his thoughts, passions, opinions, feelings, inspirations, interests, and his writings. What is required, quite frankly, is a mind unshackled by biblical chains in order to properly understand Lovecraft's work, both his fiction and much more importantly his nonfiction, as well as the man himself.

Context is your friend.

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Mary Baker

8/20/2017 11:07:01 am

"A certain mental flexibility is required to do this, naturally."

Similarly, I can see a condemnation of Mormonism in many places in the "Book of Mormon".

I am allergic to adrenaline, and shy away from horror fiction. Maybe I can try reading Lovecraft by looking at the positive in it.

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TONY S.

8/19/2017 05:06:09 pm

Lovecraft had a clear distaste for Man still embracing religion in the 20th century. In many of his essays and correspondence, he frequently discussed how it was holding the human race back from achieving greater goals and was complicit in its wasted potential. He regarded the Classical Age as Humankind's peak, and everything else since as part of a slow and inexorable decline. He both quoted and echoed Sir James Frazier's argument in THE GOLDEN BOUGH that creating religion was a necessary step in Humankind's evolution, but that it had moved far beyond the need for it long ago.

Apart from that, he found many other aspects of it distasteful, include its role in many of Mankind's most historical evil deeds, citing the most recent example (by his day) of the Puritans.

Ironic now that a Conservative Christian would attempt to use Lovecraft in promoting blind faith and dogma, two things Lovecraft loathed, but given their ignorance on so many other topics, hardly surprising.

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Americanegro

8/20/2017 04:44:24 pm

I don't like the idea of a proponent of eldritch entities from the beforetimes messing with my Lovecraft, don't believe in mixing mythologies.

'Genesis, chapters 1 to 3:
“These chapters contain the core of the Biblical myth. The god of the Old Testament is granted authorship of man’s image, precisely reversing the truth and reducing cosmic essence to man-size. In the process of attempting to suggest that our world existed at the birth of time, the text inadvertently reveals that the world was infinitely fluid and capable of transformation until it was fixed by the limits of human awareness. This is further signified both by the first man’s naming of all other species and by the symbol of the forbidden tree (the withdrawal of cosmic knowledge, which is here disguised as common ‘evil’). The serpent represents primal fluidity and unfettered consciousness, but the Bible claims that its upstart god can fix the serpent’s shape. Some Septuagint and Syriac versions of the Bible acknowledge the serpent’s real identity: Daoloth, Render of Veils.” '

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Nick Danger

8/21/2017 03:28:08 pm

The first part of Genesis describes God putting a curse on everybody, forever.

The rest of the Bible describes how, under very special circumstances, the curse may be lifted.

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Bob Jase

8/21/2017 03:06:01 pm

"many modern Christians don’t actually engage with the Bible in all its many facets but instead have created a sort of fantasy version of Christianity based on a simpler understanding of God as all-loving, a sort of cosmic grandfather."

Gee, I wonder how they got that idea?

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esaj bob

8/21/2017 03:22:29 pm

I wonder what your point is.

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